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“We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists,” the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X Friday evening. Hegseth was responding to reporting, published earlier that day by the Washington Post, about the Trump Administration’s first strike on a suspected Venezuelan drug-trafficking boat. According to the Post, Hegseth had issued a verbal order to “kill everybody.” (The White House denied this allegation.) The vessel, off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, was incinerated. But, the Post reported, commanders watching the operation saw that “two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.” Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, ordered another strike to implement Hegseth’s directive, and “the two men were blown apart in the water.” Hegseth and the Pentagon have denounced the Post’s account without being specific about what they dispute. “Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command,” Hegseth asserted. The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, added, “We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false.”

This has been a year when the unthinkable has become routine. Since that first strike, on September 2nd, the United States has attacked more than twenty additional boats, killing more than eighty people. The Administration claims that the U.S. is in an armed conflict with “narco-terrorists” trying to kill Americans, a situation that it argues permits the use of lethal force. But its strained justifications have generated widespread condemnation from legal experts, who have expressed alarm about what they view as the U.S. misusing the law of war to engage in what amounts to extrajudicial killings. Donald Trump’s comments on the strikes have not exactly dispelled that impression. “We’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. O.K.?” he said in October. “They’re going to be, like, dead.”

Other Presidents of both parties have stretched the limits of their constitutional power to deploy the military unilaterally. In 1999, President Bill Clinton ordered an air campaign, joined by NATO allies, to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and he continued the operation beyond the sixty-day deadline imposed by the War Powers Resolution for obtaining congressional approval for military action. In 2011, Barack Obama launched missile attacks against military sites in Libya; Obama called it “a limited and well-defined mission in support of international efforts to protect civilians and prevent a humanitarian disaster.” During Trump’s first term, he launched air strikes against Syrian chemical-weapons facilities, first in 2017, and again in 2018, the second time joined by the United Kingdom and France.

The boat strikes are dramatically different—not least because they are aimed at civilian, not military, targets. The Administration’s full legal justification for such killings remains classified, but in a submission to Congress it argued that the drug cartels are “designated terrorist organizations” and that “their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.” Labelling drug cartels as terrorist groups, however, does not transform them into legitimate military targets on the level of the Islamic State and its affiliates, nor does describing their trafficking of drugs as an “armed attack” against the U.S. make that a matter of fact. “It’s playing a game of legal Mad Libs. It’s using law words in a way that is completely divorced from fact,” Tess Bridgeman, the co-editor-in-chief of the website Just Security and the deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama Administration, told me. The Administration’s legal analysis, she said, amounts to “knowingly justifying murder.”

The Post’s account of a deliberate attack on the survivors takes the situation to a new level of moral depravity and legal recklessness. On Friday, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served as the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, wrote that the Administration could make a “conceivable” argument in defense of the boat strikes. But, Goldsmith continued, “there can be no conceivable legal justification” for attacking the survivors. A group of about forty former senior military lawyers that was established in February, after Hegseth fired the Judge Advocate Generals for the Army, Air Force, and Navy (he called them “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief”) went further. “The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both,” they wrote. The group’s roster isn’t public, in part because of concerns about retaliation, but one member, Steven Lepper, a retired Air Force major general and a former Air Force judge advocate, told me that he thought Hegseth should be prosecuted for murder. “Kill them all—that is not an order that can be followed,” Lepper said.

If the Post story is accurate, Hegseth’s initial order, and the follow-up attack on the two survivors, violate two fundamental and intersecting principles of the law of war. One is the prohibition against orders to give “no quarter”—to refuse offers of surrender or to summarily execute detainees. The Defense Department’s Law of War Manual, which provides what it describes as authoritative legal guidance for military conduct, states flatly, “It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given.” The second is the protections provided to those who are considered hors de combat—removed from combat. Again, from the Law of War Manual: “Combatants, placed hors de combat must not be made the object of attack.” According to the Post, Admiral Bradley implausibly claimed that the survivors of the boat strike “were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” The manual, however, rejects such justifications: “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.” Even the ordinarily bellicose Trump appeared uncomfortable with the killings, telling reporters that he was confident that Hegseth did not issue the order to take out the survivors, and adding, “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike.” (On Monday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, took a different approach, asserting that “Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”)

As it happened, the Post report was published the week after six Democratic members of Congress, all with military or intelligence backgrounds, released a video reminding service members of their duty to disobey unlawful commands. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” Senator Mark Kelly, of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, said. The Trump Administration took a whole-of-government stance on reprisal. Trump blasted the video as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.” The Pentagon soon announced that it was investigating Kelly for “serious allegations of misconduct”—a move that could theoretically lead to Kelly being recalled to active duty and subjected to court-martial. (The other lawmakers fall outside of the Pentagon’s jurisdiction, because either they did not serve long enough to retire or, in the case of Senator Elissa Slotkin, of Michigan, they worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.) The lawmakers then reported that the F.B.I. was seeking to schedule interviews with them.

There is a chance that the horror of the strike on the survivors, combined with the Administration’s scant legal explanations for the boat strikes in general, may evoke a most elusive event: bipartisan pushback. In the aftermath of the Post story, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee vowed “vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.” The chair and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee followed with a pledge “to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.” Speaking on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, the Republican congressman Mike Turner, of Ohio, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee and previously chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said of the Post report, “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.” The Republican congressman Don Bacon, of Nebraska, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he was “very suspicious” that Hegseth “would be foolish enough” to have issued such an order. But, he continued, “if it was as the article said, that is a violation of the law of war. When people want to surrender, you don’t kill them, and they have to pose an imminent threat. It’s hard to believe that two people on a raft, trying to survive, would pose an imminent threat.”

No one who has witnessed the behavior of this Republican-controlled Congress during these past ten months should feel confident that these are the stirrings of a newly assertive legislative branch. But what happens if and when video of the incident—it exists, because the Administration released a redacted version—becomes available, showing the survivors and their killing? This could be a moment—like My Lai, like Abu Ghraib—when the country is shocked into remembering its aspirations. “We’re supposed to be the good guys,” Lepper told me. “We have always prided ourselves on being an honorable military. We have crossed the line here into clear illegality and clear dishonor.” ♦

Last week, the Washington Post reported that, in early September, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the military to kill everyone on board a boat in the Caribbean suspected of carrying drugs. After an initial strike on the boat, two men were still alive; a second missile was launched to comply with Hegseth’s order. In the past three months, similar strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific have killed more than eighty people; the Post report was only the most disturbing example in a campaign that many legal experts and government officials believe to be unlawful. (On Sunday, President Trump said that Hegseth told him he had not given such an order.) This past weekend, the Republican heads of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, in a rare break from Trump, joined the ranking Democrats on the committees in calling for further investigation of the September attack.

To talk about the Trump Administration’s strikes, I called Todd Huntley, the director of the National Security Law program at Georgetown University Law Center. Huntley previously served as a judge advocate in the Navy for more than two decades. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the apparent illegality of what has been reported about this attack, the similarities and differences between this strike and the worst parts of America’s drone wars, and, more broadly, what the Trump Administration wants to do to the culture of the U.S. military.

If the Washington Post’s reporting is accurate, why exactly was this strike illegal?

Basically, this is the one strike that we know about where even if you accept the Administration’s position that the United States is in an armed conflict with these drug cartels, this would still be unlawful under the laws of armed conflict, because the individuals were out of the fight and shipwrecked, and thus owed protection.

So it is essentially the same as if you storm the beaches at Normandy and a German puts his hands up and you shoot him anyway?

It’s kind of the same, but it is the law of the sea, and the law of naval warfare has developed separately from the law of land warfare and the law of armed conflict. And long-standing tradition around the law of the sea has come to take on a legal status. But in general it is the same.

When you say it would potentially be a violation of the law, are we talking about international law? Are we talking about domestic law?

It’s a violation of customary international law. And, again, this is accepting the Administration’s position that we are in armed conflict with drug cartels. [In October, the Administration notified Congress that it was in a so-called non-international armed conflict, which refers to a conflict with non-state actors.] So it’s a violation of customary international law and the law of armed conflict. Those provisions have also been incorporated into American domestic law. And so under domestic law it would be murder and it would constitute a war crime.

You’re saying that all of these things would be true even if we take as a given the Administration’s position that we are in an armed military conflict with drug cartels, correct?

Right.

What has the Administration been saying about this so-called conflict? I sense from your tone of voice that you don’t find their arguments particularly compelling, but what is the Administration claiming, and why do you think what they’re claiming is problematic?

Their claims have contradicted each other. Initially, the claim was that the United States was using force against these boats and members of the drug cartels as an act of self-defense, and they equated the importation of drugs to an armed attack against the United States. Then, in one of the notices to Congress, they claim that we are in a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartels. The factors that determine whether you’re in such a conflict with a non-state group are: You look at the level of organization of the group—it has to reach a certain level of organization, and have some sort of command-and-control structure, be able to resupply itself, be able to plan and carry out operations, those types of things. And then the violence has to reach a certain level of intensity, because if it doesn’t meet those factors, what you have is basically just unlawful violent action, which is a law-enforcement matter. And so the advantage, if you will, of triggering a non-international armed conflict is that you can use force against members of that group as a matter of first resort. It’s not like law enforcement, where you have to use the minimal amount of force. If you’ve identified a member of the group, you can kill him no matter where he is, and no matter what he’s doing.

So that would be the legal basis under international law. The domestic legal basis comes from a line of several Office of Legal Counsel (O.L.C.) opinions. These O.L.C. opinions have stated that the President, as the Commander-in-Chief under Article II, has authority to use military force if it is in the U.S. national interest, and if it’s for a limited duration, scope, and intensity. The idea is that when the President has to respond to an attack on the United States, you shouldn’t require him to get congressional authorization before he does. But here, if they say we’re in a non-international armed conflict, an ongoing armed conflict, that contradicts the fact that this is of limited scope and duration. The domestic legal basis seems to conflict with the international legal basis.

Aside from the fact that those two bases conflict, what do you make of them separately as arguments?

Could we be in a non-international armed conflict with drug cartels? Yes, I think theoretically we could be, or the facts could support that. But I just don’t see the facts here. The level of violence, at least as directed against the United States, isn’t so great unless you’re going to count the effects of the drugs and the drug use itself. That is what the Administration is doing, but I think it is too indirect to be legitimate. The groups certainly are not organized at the level that we saw with Al Qaeda, for instance, and the Administration seems to lump all these drug cartels in together, when they’re really, in fact, rivals. They are not acting in concert. So I just don’t think that the Administration has shown the facts that support their legal analysis.

What they have done is they’ve said all the magic words. They have laid out the correct legal framework, but they just haven’t brought forth the facts that support it. I guess if you believe that the President just has the discretion to do this, that basically nobody can question the President’s assessment of the facts—that is kind of problematic.

If you consider some of the U.S.’s worst acts in the war on terror, such as the bombing of a wedding party in Yemen, in 2013, or the strike on a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz, in 2015, what makes this different? Is it in fact different?

I think it’s the intentional nature of it. In most of those other situations where U.S. attacks have killed civilians, the deaths were due to either faulty intelligence, a faulty assessment of the facts, or an accident. This one seems to have been very clearly intentional. I think that is one thing that makes it much different, and on some level worse, because if you’re looking at the use of force in an armed conflict and you have violations, not everything rises to the level of a war crime. This is a war crime.

My understanding of international law is that you can be relying on faulty intelligence, but if faulty intelligence happens enough times, at a certain point, if you are not taking proper precautions that could be a war crime.

You are right. If it happens enough where basically it can be imputed to the commander that he or she is not exercising the level of command that is required to control the forces, then, yes, that could rise to the level of a war crime.

During the war on terror, either in the fight against Al Qaeda or the fight against ISIS, civilian deaths were much, much higher than they are in this Caribbean campaign so far. But you don’t feel that those campaigns involved the same level of intent, or a lack of precautions to make sure the intelligence was correct?

As you said, there were many more civilian deaths and injuries during Afghanistan and Iraq, but legally speaking, if you’re looking at intent and culpability, this is worse. The Administration intentionally targeted people who they knew or should have known had a protected status at the time they were attacked.

This would probably be akin to some events we’ve read about in which U.S. soldiers killed Afghans or Iraqis. Trump has even pardoned some of those perpetrators.

That’s exactly right. We certainly had instances where we had soldiers commit similar violations. And, again, what makes this different is it seems to have come from a direct order from the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Special Operations Commander, Admiral Frank (Mitch) Bradley.

I think there’s viscerally something quite obviously different about this, despite some of the horrible things that happened in the War on Terror. But when you read about some of the war-on-terror incidents, like the wedding party that was bombed in Yemen, it does seem that they were not really properly investigated. The least that any democratic country that cares about not committing war crimes should do is investigate potential violations to the best of their abilities.

I don’t disagree with you that there were certainly times when investigations sometimes didn’t happen, and others when they did but weren’t really serious investigations. I was involved in several civilian-casualty investigations myself, and we were hampered at times due to the inability to gain access to the area. A lot of these casualties are from drone strikes, and we don’t have U.S. forces in the area. Some of them probably were done without sufficient care. Others I think were taken seriously and were done at a fairly complex level.

Let’s say that you’re right about the boat strike and that this is murder. What should happen next?

Well, it needs to be investigated by Congress. And, again, depending on what the investigation uncovers, there should be prosecutions if there is sufficient evidence to indicate that this was, in fact, a violation.

What would an investigation look like, in an ideal world?

The military would probably get assistance from the F.B.I. due to the level and the seriousness of the inquiry that would have to take place. Plus, I would think that you would want somebody from outside of the Department of Defense involved in the investigation. And if Hegseth is involved, and if, in fact, he gave the order and there’s evidence that he did it intentionally, he can’t be tried by a court martial: because he’s a civilian, he is not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It would have to go to a U.S. Attorney’s office, probably in the Eastern District of Virginia. Admiral Bradley, on the other hand, is certainly subject to the U.C.M.J. It might be difficult to prosecute him in a court martial just because you would have to find enough officers who are senior to him, and he’s a four-star, but you could do it. In a court martial, officers serve as the jury and have to be senior in rank to the defendant. But my guess is that, if an Administration wanted to look into this—and it won’t happen until there’s a new one—they would decide to do this through the D.O.J. and the U.S. Attorney’s office. Bradley could be prosecuted that way.

Broadly speaking, do you feel that the message that was sent to the military in the pre-Trump era was essentially that people who did illegal things would be punished to the full extent of the law? Or did you feel that it was something between that and the “anything goes” we see in the Trump Administration? I want to acknowledge that I think something has changed without saying that things were ideal in the first place.

I think you’re spot-on. As far as I can remember, and in terms of what I’ve read about, we have always been hesitant to hold our soldiers accountable for crimes that happened during a conflict. I think back to Lieutenant William Calley in My Lai. Even though he ended up being convicted, it took a lot to get there. [Calley was convicted by court martial on twenty-two counts of murder, but ended up serving just three years of house arrest.] And then President Nixon commuted his sentence. And so I think that, as a society, we have had the view: Who are we to judge? We send these people into a very difficult situation. We can’t place ourselves in their shoes, and therefore maybe we should give them a break. But I think you’re right that things have basically gone way beyond that. I mean, who’s advising Hegseth right now? One of his special advisers is Tim Parlatore, who is Eddie Gallagher’s defense counsel. Eddie Gallagher was the Navy SEAL whom his own team members turned in when they returned from a deployment to Iraq; they accused him of shooting civilians. And, in the end, he went to court martial for allegedly stabbing a teen-age wounded ISIS member in the neck and killing him, and then taking pictures.

And we should say Parlatore wasn’t the defense counsel because he was assigned to this. He chose this case.

Right. Because he was not a military attorney. He had served in the military as a surface-warfare officer, had left the service, went to law school, had a very successful criminal-defense practice. And when Secretary Hegseth came into office, he gave Parlatore a commission as a commander, even though he had never been a JAG, and made him a special adviser.

There’s also the broader question of how we know that these boats are smuggling drugs—we’re just taking the Administration’s word for that. I guess that’s always the case to some degree when the government is waging war. But I’ve just been struck by the lack of public accounting for that.

Yeah. I don’t understand it. In any other time, you would have Congress demanding to be shown some of the evidence or the intel, and I don’t understand why they haven’t been more forceful in that. And, of course, the Administration’s line is going to be “Well, this is all based on classified information. We can’t share it, we can’t disclose it.” But when the government is killing people in our name, I think they owe it at least to our representatives to make their case at some level. And, if you go back to the Cuban missile crisis, even Kennedy released classified spy photos to show why his Administration was taking the steps it was going to take.

The last time we were under as much threat as we are from these drug cartels.

Yeah, nuclear annihilation. Or drug smugglers. You didn’t ask, but one thing I’d like to add is just that I am really torn because I served with some of these people and I had a lot of respect for them. I’m talking about in the Pentagon, but I also served in Afghanistan with Mitch Bradley, who’s the commander in this, and I thought the world of him. And so it’s really—I don’t know. It’s hard to process for me. ♦

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Miriam Toews joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Elephant,” by Raymond Carver, which was published in The New Yorker in 1986. Toews has published ten books, including the novels “A Complicated Kindness,” which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction; “All My Puny Sorrows,” “Women Talking,” and “Fight Night”—and the memoir “A Truce That Is Not Peace.”

On a recent Thursday, the eve of Zohran Mamdani’s first meeting with President Donald Trump, the Mayor-elect stopped by a reading at Book Culture, near Columbia University. The subject of the book was dictators. The author: his dad, Mahmood Mamdani, a leading scholar in the field of post-colonial studies. The elder Mamdani, who wore a maroon scarf looped over a dark blazer, was describing his firsthand experience with authoritarian rule, in Uganda. “Power corrupts, to different degrees,” he said, drawing laughs from the crowd of about eighty. “You have to be on your watch, every minute and every second.” Heads tilted toward the younger Mamdani, who sat on a folding chair in the front row, suited and smiling. “That’s a good place to end it,” the moderator suggested. “With a little warning to the room.” The politician, who had an early flight to D.C. in the morning, greeted a handful of well-wishers, then slipped out quietly.

Mahmood Mamdani, who is seventy-nine, was also having a busy month. Three weeks before his son’s election victory, he released his twelfth book, “Slow Poison,” a political history of Uganda under two dictators, Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni. The book also traces his own upbringing, expulsion, and eventual return to Uganda. “Both Mira and Zohran insisted I insert myself as a character,” he said, referring to his wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair. “I wasn’t totally convinced.” As for the book’s timing, “that is totally accidental,” he said. “I’ve been working on this for ten years.”

On the day of the reading, the author consented to a brief tour of the Morningside Heights apartment where he and Nair have lived since 1999. “This is Zohran’s bedroom, untouched by displacement,” he said, pushing open a door to a tidy, dormlike sleeping quarters. A shelf over the bed held sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, boyhood guidebooks (“The Way Things Work”), and a worn copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader.” A portrait of a teen-age Zohran, by the Pakistani painter Salman Toor, hung from a wall, along with a sign that read “Hippies use side door.” Asked about its significance, the father shrugged.

In house slippers, Mahmood shuffled toward a spacious study, where he is now working on his next book. “It is about Israel and Palestine to a significant extent,” he said. He is currently on medical leave from Columbia for back problems. Despite misgivings over the university’s settlement with Trump, he plans to return to teaching soon. “I’m not intimidated easily,” he noted. In the book, he describes fleeing Uganda in 1972, as Amin ordered the expulsion of the country’s Indian minority. More than a decade later, when Mahmood was teaching at a university, he was recruited by Museveni to serve as the country’s inspector general. The offer was rescinded, the author writes, after he requested “a whole range of reforms.”

Lately, he has been considering the challenges of wielding municipal power. “Zohran is not a head of state—he’s the head of local government, which means the alliances he builds are going to be critical,” Mahmood said. He has found that the Mayor-elect can be “sensitive” about unsolicited advice, at least when it comes from his father. Over all, the scholar has been impressed by his son’s political instincts. “I’m struck by his determination to say, ‘Yes, this is what I am: a Muslim from Africa of Indian descent.’ ” A student assistant, working in the other room, was summoned to provide the Wi-Fi password. “It’s probably Zohran1991 or Zohran91,” Mahmood said. “Since he appeared, everything began to rotate around him.”

Like many fathers and sons, they occasionally have political disagreements. “The first one I remember was when I wrote ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,’ ” the author recalled, referring to his 2004 book on the rise of political Islam. Zohran, then a teen-ager, felt that his father’s analysis was overly historical, and that it ignored the popular understanding of certain weighted terms. “He queried me pretty hard,” Mahmood said. “We talked about it, but I’m not sure we agreed.”

The family remains close. They still eat out together in Manhattan, though they are joined now by security and, often, scores of adoring supporters. Even during the campaign, the candidate and his wife, Rama Duwaji, came by “at least one night every week,” Mahmood said, occasionally staying in the childhood bedroom to avoid the schlep back to Astoria. If the couple decides to move into Gracie Mansion, in Yorkville, the commute will be much shorter, he noted.

From the study, Mahmood walked down a long hallway lined with family photos and took a seat in an airy living room overlooking the Hudson River. Since the election, he has tried to maintain his routines: hour-long walks in the park each morning, writing, exercise. “I am not easily distracted,” he said. Still, the new level of fame has taken some getting used to. Recently, he and his wife walked out of a movie theatre to find a crowd of bar patrons applauding them. “One person must have pointed us out and suddenly there were fifty to a hundred people clapping while having their drinks,” he recalled. “That was strange.” There have been other unexpected developments, too. “My agent tells me that sales of three books have gone up since the primary,” the author said. “And one has been reprinted.” ♦

Opera landed in Spain in 1627, less than three decades after the art first arose, in Florence. That year, Italian expatriates in Madrid presented “La Selva sin Amor” (“The Forest Without Love”), with a libretto by the towering Spanish playwright Félix Lope de Vega and music by Filippo Piccinini and Bernardo Monanni. No one took much notice. At a time when Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Cervantes were weaving verbal spells upon the stage, music must have seemed a superfluous addition—just as, in England, the mighty lines of Marlowe and Shakespeare hardly cried out for melodic elaboration. A few decades later, the first zarzuela operas launched a homegrown music-theatre tradition, although their mixture of song and spoken text proved difficult to export. In the centuries that followed, Spanish opera found little international resonance. To date, the Met has staged only two works from Spain: Enrique Granados’s “Goyescas,” in 1916, and Manuel de Falla’s “La Vida Breve,” in 1926.

To see Spanish opera, then, you have to go to the source. Last month, in Valencia, I attended the world première of Francisco Coll’s “Enemigo del Pueblo,” an adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.” The setting was the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Santiago Calatrava’s futuristic beached whale of an opera house, which opened in 2005. Despite endless controversy over the design—the building cost hundreds of millions of dollars and required extensive modifications to remain functional—the resident company has found a prominent place on the European scene. Its glory is its youthful orchestra, the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, which plays with greater fire and focus than many more venerable ensembles.

Coll, a forty-year-old native of Valencia, began his education in Spain and completed it in England, studying there with Thomas Adès, a master of twenty-first-century opera. Coll’s early works, with their prickly eclecticism and their fondness for instrumental grotesquerie, reflect the influence of Adès and György Ligeti, among others. Lately, Coll has found a distinctive voice—a kind of romantic neo-modernism, abrasive and rhapsodic by turns. For the maverick violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Coll has written a Violin Concerto that is among the finest recent examples of an overworked form: anarchic virtuosity in the outer movements offsets a central episode of desperate lyrical power.

“An Enemy of the People” seemed to be a strong choice for Coll’s first full-length piece of music theatre. (In 2013, he wrote “Café Kafka,” a one-act chamber opera.) Strangely, Ibsen’s drama had never been adapted for the operatic stage, even though its primary conflict—a righteous individual confronting society—seems tailor-made for the genre. You can imagine the elderly Verdi seizing hold of the material. The libretto, by Àlex Rigola, who also directed the production, keeps the main narrative intact: Dr. Stockmann, a scientist connected with a prosperous spa in his town, discovers that the spa’s waters are contaminated and, in his quest to publicize the truth, becomes a pariah. The action is transposed to an oceanside much like Valencia’s; the set designer Patricia Albizu supplies painterly backdrops of sand, sea, and sky. The shift also brings to mind the play’s most famous latter-day progeny, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” although no gliding shark fins or chugging double-basses intrude.

Perhaps Rigola should have been more willful in his handling of the text, since his libretto unfolds more like a selection of highlights from the play than like a freestanding adaptation. Ibsen’s five acts are compressed into two, with a total running time of less than ninety minutes. As a result, the collapse of Stockmann’s crusade feels rushed—especially in the pivotal town-meeting scene, in which his brother, the mayor, outmaneuvers him and fellow-citizens shout him down. We don’t get to see Stockmann losing composure by degrees; instead, he lurches almost at once into his incendiary speech condemning the stupidity of the majority. The final scenes, in which Stockmann resolves to reëducate the people on his own, unfold in even more precipitate, sketchy fashion.

All the same, “Enemigo” made for a gripping evening, largely on the strength of Coll’s stem-winder of a score. The opera begins with a kinetic, frantic prelude in the form of a paso doble, the quick march often heard at bullfights. Here, though, the meter is mainly a lopsided 7/8, the harmony a mangled G major. Such folkloric touches occur at intervals throughout the work, signalling the popular energies that will consume Stockmann. The doctor himself is characterized sometimes by boisterously chattering lines, sometimes by semi-Wagnerian bombast; at the end, his music turns elegiac, implicitly undercutting his dreams of beginning anew. The crowd scenes, however abbreviated, unleash explosive energy. Pummelling orchestral passages hint at the neutral rage of nature itself.

The opening-night cast, while capable and engaged, struggled at times to make itself heard above Coll’s potent orchestration. José Antonio López, as Stockmann, showed a handsome, limber baritone, yet he had trouble breaking through the sonic melee. The American soprano Brenda Rae, as Stockmann’s supportive daughter, Petra, managed to hold her own, combining brilliant high notes with an expressive chest-voice. The composer conducted, and, even if he overindulged his players, he led with a clear, confident beat. Not surprisingly, he received the evening’s loudest ovation. It wasn’t just a home-town audience embracing a native son; it was a cosmopolitan public saluting a significant new creative force in the opera world.

In Madrid, the Teatro Real, Spain’s flagship opera house since 1850, was offering an all-Bartók evening: the one-act ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and the one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle,” with the first movement of the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta as a weighty intermezzo. The Teatro Real has vigorously supported contemporary opera in recent decades, mounting twenty world premières since 1997. (The company co-produced Coll’s “Enemigo” and will present it in February.) Since 2013, the Teatro Real has been led by the Catalan impresario Joan Matabosch, who has a flair for balancing progressive ideas against conservative tastes while placating political overseers.

The Bartók production was the work of the veteran German director Christof Loy, who has lately moved to Madrid and founded a company dedicated to reviving zarzuelas. Loy’s staging, which was first seen in Basel in 2022, has no hint of local color: the sets, by Márton Ágh, evoke a nondescript urban wasteland, with a beat-up telephone booth on one side, a hulking warehouselike structure on the other, and junk strewn about. That milieu is an organic match for “Mandarin,” in which desperadoes use a girl to entrap passersby until the indestructible title character complicates their scheme. It’s more of a stretch for “Bluebeard,” in which Judith, the newest bride of a sinister nobleman, discovers the fate of her predecessors. Still, Loy’s gritty minimalism, enlivened with bleak, Beckettian humor, established a convincing continuity for the evening.

Loy choreographed “Mandarin” himself, in a free, athletic style that often suggested a sexualized boxing match. Carla Pérez Mora played the girl with self-possessed ferocity; Gorka Culebras made the mandarin a soulfully suffering martyr. In “Bluebeard,” the dominant presence was the perennially riveting German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius, who sang Judith with cutting force and fleshed out her portrayal with pinpoint actorly gestures. Not since Anja Silja have I seen a singer embody the workings of fate simply by folding her hands resignedly in her lap. Christof Fischesser, as Bluebeard, could not match Herlitzius’s intensity, but his polished, deep-set bass provided a strong musical anchor. Gustavo Gimeno, in the pit, showed an instinctive command of Bartók’s rhythms and colors. Those pioneering Florentines would have found the whole thing incomprehensible, yet it came close to fulfilling their theatrical ideal—a seamless fusion of text, music, image, and feeling. ♦